If one definition of a classic is that it constantly yields new meanings, then David Harrower’s play deserves the title. On first viewing the 1995 Edinburgh Traverse production, I took it to be a play about female empowerment through language. While that is one of its themes, watching Yaël Farber’s visually powerful if aurally overloaded revival, I discovered many more.

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On one level, the play has the simplicity of a fable. In a pre-industrial, God-fearing community, we see a character known simply as Young Woman tethered like an animal to a village ploughman called Pony William. Although, like everyone else, she is taught to hate the local miller, the woman finds in him a source of emotional release that enables her to escape her husband and articulate her long-suppressed feelings. In that sense, the play echoes Shaw’s Pygmalion and Wesker’s Roots, in that it becomes a play about a woman’s liberation through words.

There is no doubt that the central figure is a more fulfilled human being by the close, but Farber’s production reminds you that language brings with it the capacity to lie.

While the woman has the ability to generate life, through delivering a mare’s pony, she also becomes an accomplice to murder. Even the miller, whom I initially took to be a figure of bookish enlightenment, can be viewed as a shrewd exploiter who profits by turning the hard-won grain into flour. In short, Harrower’s play offers multiple meanings, from a critique of the pastoral myth to a study in the equivocal nature of language.

Farber, as in all her work, employs a visceral theatricality. Soutra Gilmour’s design is dominated by a giant, vertical millstone and a mud-caked surface. Tim Lutkin’s lighting moodily pierces the circumambient darkness. The action is even prefaced by a bout of rough sex between Pony William and the young woman. My only complaint lies in the overuse of sound, ranging from plangent cello chords to an insistent hum during the Young Woman’s best speech. Undeterred, Judith Roddy is superb, bringing out the character’s mix of defiance, curiosity and, eventually, low cunning. Both the men in her life are darkly bearded, physically similar types, but I preferred Matt Ryan’s miller to Christian Cooke’s Pony William, simply because he gave full value to Harrower’s poetic text.

It is a tremendous play and, for all its occasional excesses, Farber’s production feels more genuinely biblical than her recent, insufferable Salomé.